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Paula Crossfield is a founder and the Editor-at-large of Civil Eats. She is also a co-founder of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. Her reporting has been featured in The Nation, Gastronomica, Index Magazine, The New York Times and more, and she has been a contributing producer at The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio. An avid cook and gardener, she currently lives in Oakland.

Obama’s Chief Agricultural Negotiator Nominee a Pesticide Pusher

The industrial agriculture complex has been doing back flips for the last few weeks, first because of the ascendance of Blanche Lincoln (ConservaDem-AR) to the high throne of the Senate Agriculture Committee, where she promises to pinch climate legislation (or at the very least shove it aside until next year) and push a southern Big Ag agenda in the Senate for rice and cotton interests. Now, the White House has announced Islam A. Siddiqui, current Vice President for Science and Regulatory Affairs at CropLife America (you will remember the organization as the one that sent the First Lady a letter admonishing her for not using pesticides on the White House garden) as nominee for Chief Agricultural Negotiator, who works through the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) to promote our crops and ag products abroad.

Why does it matter if the Vice President from the trade association representing pesticides and other agricultural chemicals takes over the Office of Agricultural Affairs at the USTR? Well, because that office, according to the USTR website “has overall responsibility for negotiations and policy coordination regarding agriculture.” That means he would oversee the office dedicated to:

The Chief Agricultural Negotiator is essentially a ‘spokesperson’ for American agriculture (perhaps the ‘bad cop’ to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack’s ‘good cop’) who is in charge of selling our agricultural products abroad — products of a synthetic agriculture that is dependent on too many oil inputs, too much water and a stable climate to persist as the norm into the future. Here is an official job description for the Chief Agricultural Negotiator from the website Progressive Government:

The Chief Agriculture Negotiator for the United States conducts critical trade negotiations and enforces trade agreements that relate to U.S. agricultural products and services. Also works to expand the access for America’s farmers and agricultural producers to overseas markets and is responsible for directing all U.S. agriculture trade negotiations anywhere in the world. This includes multilaterally in the World Trade Organization (WTO), regionally in the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and bilaterally with various countries and groups of countries such as Australia, Central America, Chile, Morocco, and the South African Customs Union. The ambassador also resolves agricultural trade disputes and enforces trade agreements, including issues related to new technologies, subsidies, and tariff and non-tariff barriers and meets regularly with domestic agricultural industry groups to assure their interests are represented in trade. He or she also coordinates closely with U.S. government regulatory agencies to assure that rules and policies in international trade are based on sound science.

What might a former employee of CropLife think is sound science? And what might his agenda be for expanding our markets abroad? I’m sure Siddiqui is already a regular at agricultural industry meetings, and will be ready and willing to say just what they’d like to hear. (Before CropLife, Siddiqui also served in the Clinton administration under former Ag Secretary Dan Glickman, the Ag Secretary best known for taking part in the sign-off of GM seeds as ‘substantially equivalent’ to other seeds, thus an argument for why they should not be labeled.)

The image [the pesticide industry] presents is one of a hi-tech, efficient, responsible, and green industry that is already thoroughly regulated to assure the safety of its products. While the industry quietly pursues an anti-regulatory agenda to assure no pesticides would be removed from the market, its trade association claims its aim is to “promote increasingly responsible, science-driven legislation and regulation.”
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In March 2004, CropLife poured funding into a campaign to defeat a Mendocino County ballot initiative – known as Measure H – that would make the country [sic] the first to ban genetically engineered crops. In the lead up the the vote CropLife contributed over $500,000 – more than seven times that of the initiative supporters – to defeat the proposal. Despite the massive campaign against the initiative, the bio-tech industry suffered a humiliating defeat. The measure passed by a margin of 56% to 43%.

In other words, the Obama administration has chosen someone from an organization dedicated at all costs to chemical-based agriculture to represent our trade interests abroad. All in the name of selling more Round-Up and GM seed, as well as siphoning off our excess commodities to China for their growing CAFO industry, all for our own short term economic interests.